The Understudy: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

party. A famous person’s party. He didn’t really approve of fame, of course, and consciously tried not to be influenced or impressed by it, but, still, a proper, genuine, fashionable party, full of successful, attractive, influential, beautiful people.
And he’d been invited.
    “Bravo! More!” shouted the audience.
    Josh was back by his side. “Quite a big crowd, seven onwards—what d’you think? I’d really appreciate it…”
    “Sounds good to me, Josh.”
    “More, more, encore…” shouted the audience.
    “Goodly good, mate! I’ll text you my address,” and he simulated some dainty, two-thumbed texting on a little mimed mobile phone; another of his gifts—a prodigious and gifted mime, always conjuring objects out of thin air: a waggled pint, a finger-and-thumb phone, a ball kicked into the back of the net. “Oh, and it’s suit and tie, by the way! And don’t tell the others, Maxine or Donna or anyone else. I see enough of that lot as it is. Just our little secret, yeah?”
    I’m the only one he has invited,
thought Stephen, glowing.
    “Sure, Josh, it’s our secret.”
    “Bravo! Encore! Encore…” The applause was starting to dip a little, but was still enthusiastic enough to justify another curtain call, if Josh could be bothered to take it.
    “What d’you reckon? Think I can squeeze one more out of them?” asked Josh, grinning.
    “Go for it!” said Stephen, now full of goodwill for his old pal. Josh turned and strolled slowly out onto the stage, wiping his forehead with the sleeve of his sweat-soaked puffy shirt, and the audience’s applause swelled once more as he stood at the front of the stage, looking around slowly, up into the gods and down at the stalls, applauding the audience back, thanking them, flattering them.
    Standing invisible in the wings, perspiring into his black unitard, Stephen C. McQueen looked down at his own hands and found, to his surprise, that he was applauding too.

Kitchen-Sink Drama

    A s a teenager, falling in love with old British movies of the fifties and sixties on telly, Stephen had always been fascinated by the notion of “the bedsit.” He liked to imagine himself, in black-and-white, as an Albert Finney type, living in shabby-romantic furnished rooms overlooking the railway lines at two shillings and sixpence a week, where he’d smoke Woodbines, listen to trad jazz and bang angrily at his typewriter, while Julie Christie padded around wearing one of his old shirts. That’s the life for me. One day—the teenage Stephen had thought, captivated—one day,
I’ll
have my very own bedsit, little suspecting that this was the only one of his fantasies that was destined to come true.
    The estate agents hadn’t actually called it a bedsit, of course. They called it a “studio,” implying that you could either live in it or record your new album there, the choice was yours. The “studio” was situated in a drab, nameless area between Battersea and Wandsworth, the kind of neighborhood where every lamppost is garlanded with a rusting bike frame. A small row of shops contained all the necessary local amenities: a Chinese take-away, an off-license, a laundry, a scurvy-inducing Warsaw Pact grocer’s called Price£avers, where a packet of Weetabix cost £3.92, and a terrifying pub, the Lady Macbeth, a floodlit maximum-security wing that had unaccountably been issued with a drinks license.
    Stephen’s epic journey home involved the tube to Victoria, changing at Green Park, an overland train to Clapham Junction, then a lurching bus and a brisk, nerve-jangling fifteen-minute walk, past Chicken Cottage, Chicken Village and World of Chicken’n’Ribs, then on to Idaho Fried Chicken, Idaho being the last remaining U.S. state to be granted its own south London fried-chicken franchise. There he ran the gauntlet of the feral children, who stood in the doorway and hailed his nightly return with hearty cries of “wanker/tosser/twat.” He unlocked the anonymous,